Bicycle Trade Union Excerpt: Vertigo

Keep having dreams of falling, waking up grasping and slapping for walls and lamps.  Vertigo, a slicing, biting collapse of reality into downwardness.  I thought it was just a dream, so I looked it up in an interperative book, said something about being cast out, adversity to overcome.  I was comforted by that, because it made sense, made me feel that the cold waves of rain were a part of something with meaning.  The vertigo though, it comes in waves, sometimes making me vomit off the bridges or dragging me from my bike into the gutter.

Because it began in a dream, I now find it harder and harder to determine what it is that is concrete in my reality.  I have begun to wonder if it is all sudden figments of flashing dreams clotted together to try and attempt to be something solid.  It has brought me back to basics.  I shaved my head, like a monkey who has spent to much time in space.  Omnia mea mecum porto, I carry with me all my things.  If you want to try to take my backpack, I will kill you.  I am as prepared as I can be for anything, because anything and everything may just appear.

I don't know what it is about me, something in my face?  Maybe it is something in me which lets them all see that no matter the bad or ill they feel that I can always tell them a story that will make them scared.  Everyone tells me something.  They open their mouths and without even knowing it, all the things they never wanted to or will not say have been spat across into the air between us.  In the end, despite the small perks of transparency, the ability to create honesty and trust spontaneously has turned me into a boatman.  A man trolling and dredging a quagmire of sadness and violence and painful fear in people's secrets.  I am a seeker for that which is unfindable, and a keeper, a cache of shared broken dreams.

There is a violence growing in me, like none I have felt before.  Not like a knife fight, not like a shotgun or pistol.  This rainy place, all the endless miles pounded out on the legs, all the bleeding in the streets waiting after the bicycle hits a tree...  This purgatory, this place I have fallen to, to serve and bleed and pray to things I do not even believe in.  It is a violence of a bottle filled with gasoline and rag.  It is a violence of a violin watching a fire.  It is a violence that will put their children in a blender.